The Yellow House

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Map-Movement 1, Chapter 3

Movement 1, Chapters 4-7

Movement 2, Chapters 1-5

Movement 2, Chapters 6-10

Movement 3, Chapters 1-4

Movement 3, Chapters 5-8

Movement 4, Chapters 1-5

Movement 4, Chapter 6-After

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Map-Movement 1, Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Movement 1: “The World Before Me”

Map Summary

The Yellow House opens with an aerial view of 4121 Wilson Avenue, a plot of land in New Orleans East. From the aerial view, Broom’s brother Carl, or “Rabbit,” is invisible. Carl works in maintenance at NASA. He likes fishing and being by the water. 4121 Wilson Avenue is where Broom’s house used to be. At 19 years old, Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought the house in 1961. Ivory Mae has twelve children, of whom Broom is the youngest.

Broom searches through history books for mentions of New Orleans East. The books document the French Quarter, the Garden District, and St. Charles Avenue. Yet despite the fact that New Orleans East is one-quarter of the entire city and roughly 50 times the size of the French Quarter, the only references to New Orleans East are in passing. Before Hurricane Katrina, the neighborhood had trailer parks, junkyards and prostitution. People in New Orleans tried to forget this neighborhood, and Broom avoids telling people where she is from.

In 2005, the house is destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. Now it is a plot of land “where instead of a floor there is green grass trying to grow” (18). New Orleans East is mentioned in guided tours that show tourists the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina, or “the Water” (18), destroyed the neighborhood Broom grew up in. Tourists take photos of the destruction.

Movement 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Amelia ‘Lolo’”

Broom’s grandmother is Amelia. Although she doesn’t know her birthday, Amelia tells everyone she was born in July 1916 because “fixed details were important to stories” (31). Amelia, whose mother Rosanna dies in childbirth, is born on Ormond Plantation in St. Rose, a town on Louisiana’s River Road near the site of the largest slave revolt in American history in 1811. Five hundred enslaved people made it 20 miles before they were halted by a white militia. Today, the plantations are surrounded by petrochemical refineries emitting toxic smoke. Amelia moves from St. Rose to New Orleans to live with her eldest sister Edna, a Jehovah’s Witness. They live on Phillip Street. People make up their own names. For example, Bertha Riens is Aunt Shugah. Amelia is called Lolo.

Amelia is dark-skinned and attractive. She has “dancing eyes” or “laughing eyes” (37). Although she drops out of school after the fifth grade, Amelia can read and write. She is also deeply spiritual, finding what the author calls the “numinous in the everyday” (32). At the same time, she is practical and hardworking. Amelia has three children—Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory Mae—with Lionel Soule, a married man. She raises her kids alone.

Movement 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory”

Ivory Mae is Broom’s mother. Named after the color and material of elephant tusks. Ivory Mae is close to her older siblings, Joseph and Elaine. Elaine’s skin is the darkest, though all three children have lighter skin than Amelia. Amelia tries to give them the childhood she didn’t have, collecting beautiful things and taking good care of them.

Amelia works as a cleaner and saves up for classes at Coinson’s School of Practical Nurses. As a nurse, he works as Charity Hospital and in private homes. There are whispers that Amelia had three other children who died. When Ivory Mae is seven years old, the family moves to a double house on South Roman Street. Amelia marries Mr. Elvin, a longshoreman.

Movement 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Webb”

Edward Webb—called Webb—is a neighborhood boy who grew up one street away from Ivory Mae. Ivory Mae is quiet and a good student. By contrast, Webb is a quarterback with few academic gifts. While Webb is crazy about Ivory Mae, Ivory Mae thinks he is a show-off who gets on her nerves. In the summer after tenth grade, they start dating, and Ivory Mae gets pregnant. Webb and Ivory Mae marry in September 1958. While Amelia is supportive, Webb’s mother Mildred believes that Ivory Mae ruined Webb’s potential. Ivory Mae plans to return to school after she gives birth. Meanwhile, Webb works construction jobs with his stepfather and has a hard time being serious. The couple moves into a room in Mildred’s house where Ivory Mae is uncomfortable.

Ivory Mae gives birth to Eddie and is prohibited from returning to high school. Shortly after Webb enlists in the army, Ivory Mae becomes pregnant with Michael. Two months shy of his 19th birthday, Webb is killed in a hit-and-run incident in Fort Worth, Texas. At the time, Ivory Mae is pregnant with her third child. Some people believe the killing was racially motivated. Others think he provoked someone, as Webb has a temper and likes to drink. The autopsy report states that he walked into traffic while under the influence of alcohol.

Ivory Mae gives birth to Darryl six months after Webb’s burial. There are rumors that Webb isn’t the father. This haunts Darryl who calls himself the black sheep of the family. Simon Broom is his biological father.

Map-Movement 1, Chapter 3 Analysis

Here and throughout the book, Broom weaves her family’s history into the history of New Orleans. For example, Amelia’s childhood is interwoven with a slave revolt that takes place over one hundred years before she is born. Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory Mae’s education is referenced in relation to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education. They attend segregated schools. The first school desegregation happens in Louisiana in November 1960 when three six-year-olds attend an all-White school. They are taught in classrooms with paper covering the window to hide the children from White parents protesting outside. In 1970, integration in high schools causes riots. Broom also connects her family history to modem social and cultural observations, writing that even in the present day, Louisiana schools are still not fully integrated. In some parishes like East Baton Rouge, formerly desegregated school districts have resegregated in the 21st century, according to The Atlantic's Adam Harris. (Harris, Adam. “The New Secession.” The Atlantic. 20 May 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/05/resegregation-baton-rouge-public-schools/589381/.)

While some of Broom’s recollections are charming and sweet, others are complicated and loaded with history. For example, Broom’s brother’s face is grazed by a bullet at a school dance. This and other evocative anecdotes depict the socioeconomic conditions of Broom’s neighborhood. Colorism is another significant theme. Alongside the racism the family faces as African Americans, Mildred treats Ivory Mae as an “other” due to her comparatively light skin. Throughout these chapters, Broom emphasizes these and other uneasy distinctions within Black communities. Meanwhile, Amelia raises her kids to believe they are equal to White people. However, the kids are aware of racism.

Throughout the book, Broom references photographs. A 1947 photograph captures Elaine and Ivory Mae at Magnolia Studio. They are dressed in matching white dresses with puffy sleeves and flowers pinned to their chests. Ivory Mae has light skin and wavy hair. Elaine has darker skin, and people are not as kind to her as a result. In the photograph, Elaine is “mean mouthed” (44). Elaine’s life is more difficult because of her darker skin and thicker hair. Here, colorism reemerges. Having internalized colorism, Ivory Mae teases a neighborhood boy with dark skin about his hair, his cleanliness, and his skin. Broom draws attention to the complexities of her mother’s understanding of race. As a child, Ivory Mae believes her mother isn’t Black, reflecting “She wasn’t black to me. She was my mama and my mama wasn’t black. Looked to me like they was trying to make my mama like the black people I didn’t like” (49). Because Ivory Mae looks down on dark-skinned people, she ignores her mother’s own dark skin because she loves her.

Another theme that emerges is the conflation of the historical with the personal. Her Uncle Goody calls Ivory Mae “41” because she was born in 1941 at the end of the Great Depression. This nickname gives Ivory Mae the “weight of history” (38), writes Broom. It links her birth to the end of the Great Depression, a period that continues to hold importance for her Uncle Goody. Another example of how the past shows up in the present is in Amelia’s attempt to start over in Chicago. Broom writes, “Chicago was the possibility of a life shorn of her fragmented past, the chance to make a new story from start to finish, but leaving her children was also the repeat of an ancient pattern” (41). By moving to Chicago, Amelia hopes to give her children more opportunity by separating them from the legacy of slavery and the present reality of the Jim Crow South. However, the legacy of her own parental abandonment weighs on her. Thus, Broom suggests that is not possible to make a new story. Rather, each new beginning and new narrative emerges from the past, as history continues to shape the present and inform the future.